#im1776

Imagine a billionaire. He’s an apolitical man. The driving purpose of his life has been to create goods and services for consumers and to provide shareholder value. He’s seventy years old, and suddenly realising he won’t be around forever starts thinking about his legacy. He consults his younger wife. She is also apolitical. After a few days or so of consulting each other they decide to find a way to donate 800 million to charity. They set to go and speak to their wealth advisors, to consult on where to go from here.

The wealth advisors create a charitable foundation, the ‘Bill Foundation’. The Bill Foundation isn’t a charity itself, the couple’s advisors explain to them, but a grant-making organisation. That way, it can parcel out money to charities – 500k here, 100k there – as it sees fit, with a diverse portfolio of charitable giving. Most of the 800 million will be invested in a mixture of bonds and equities before being charitably disbursed; this means that the 800 million, over time, is set to grow. That way, it can keep giving out grants for a century or more, with no real end in sight.

Mr. Billionaire and his wife help to chair the foundation. They round out this organisation with a few well-paid, grey-haired industry specialists. These specialists, if you asked one at a dinner party, would probably tell you they are ‘moderate left-liberals’. They believe in the power of markets – and the proceeds of those markets – in helping people.

The first grants of our imaginary foundation go out. 500k to help fight global poverty. Soon after that, 300k go to Shelter, to aid the homeless. Then 200k to the Malala Fund, to help bolster girls’ secondary education around the world. All handshake worthy causes which Mr. Billionaire has no issue with – even if he is, by his own smiling admission, “hardly a lefty-liberal” himself.

And so our imaginary Billionaire is happy, ensured of his legacy. A couple of years later, he dies surrounded by his loving family, an apparently fulfilling life well lived. The now widow of Mr. Billionaire, once her grief subsides, resolves to get further involved in the Bill Foundation. It’s her late husband’s legacy, after all. She thus becomes the head of the Foundation, and immediately sets about making some new hires.

One of these hires is a lady called Ms. Weiss. Ms. Weiss was a socialist activist in her youth, but quickly settled into a string of roles in government units dedicated to tackling child poverty. With a contralto voice, she projects gravitas. She is liked by the rest of the Foundation’s board.

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400k goes to a group called OpenDemocracy, a news site making waves in uncovering global corruption. OpenDemocracy also receives money from the George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar’s Luminate, two highly respected charitable institutions. The 200k is earmarked to help fund OpenDemocracy’s investigations into dark money in politics. 300k then goes to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. This money is to help bolster its latest campaign against online anonymity. While the Foundation was initially sceptical about the group – it operates an opaque structure with no clear evidence of who funds it – the CCDH’s management did more than enough to provide assurances. 

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And yet, something is still missing. Mr. Billionaire’s widow has seen the news reports about police brutality. She’s seen the studies on racial prejudice. She knows her friends and associates are talking about this. So she raises this with Ms. Weiss, who wholeheartedly concurs, and proposes a new hire. A week later Ms. Gibbs joins the team.

Ms. Gibbs is a forty-year-old black woman. Well-polished, presentable and well-spoken, she seems like a perfect fit. She is committed to combating inequalities wherever one can find them – and she can talk the talk on intersectionality in a way that no other Foundation employee can. Ms. Gibbs sets out implementing a new Social Justice Policy at the Foundation, with gusto.

And so a week later 500k go to the Racial Justice Network. This one claims to “bring together over thirty organisations and individuals to proactively promote racial justice.” The group holds a series of events at universities focusing on the decolonisation of education and activism. They provide written evidence to the government on the threat to racial equality from stop-and-search practices. Then 300k to Bail for Immigration Detainees, which provides free legal advice and representation to illegal migrants detained in removal centres, and whose annual reports boast of improving the success rate of detainees being allowed to remain in the country. They, too, create research reports and liaise with local government officials.

The last donation of the year however proves to be more difficult, as Ms. Gibbs wants to sign off a 100k tranche to the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity. She defends the decision by pointing to how the group was founded by Kehinde Andrews, an academic at Birmingham City University. But some board members are sceptical. The group’s website looks odd. There is an appeal for the funding of a nursery focused on “bring Black education to the youngest of children,” which one board member points out is in breach of the 2010 Equality Act.  

Harambee seems to also have a lot of guest speakers at its events who have made some rather distasteful claims about Jewish people. This makes Ms. Weiss rather uncomfortable, so she and the board hold a Zoom meeting to discuss the proposed donation. “It seems a bit full-on,” says one foundation stalwart. However, eventually, the board unanimously concludes that the chances of a journalistic exposé are slim. The donation gets green-lighted…

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Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.

Of course, some charities are innocuous, like about saving red squirrels, just as some academic expenditure goes towards useful things. However, pound-for-pound, charities are more insidious and evil than universities, at least in the UK. This might be different in the US, though America also has gigantic, influential entities like the Ford Foundation, which funds the most insane far-left disinformation.

These charities rear their heads everywhere. Every piece of legislation passed has the hands of a charity, sometimes multiple charities, on them. Legislators are fed bogus research by them, all of which coindentally conclude that differences in outcomes between individuals and between groups – which must be down to some kind of socioeconomic structural inequality – demand more money for more government programs.  

Charities are the main intermediary unit between academia and journalism. They can imbibe whatever is coming out of universities, turn the issues in question into campaigns, and then use those campaigns to secure coverage in media outlets. This all serves to exert pressure on liberal-democratic legislatures, getting them to copy-paste the charity’s findings into legislation which lawmakers can rubber-stamp.

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Philanthropist Sigrid Rausing, for example, is the 13th richest person in Britain. She’s worth roughly £9.5 billion. Coming from the Swedish family that invented Tetra Pack packaging, Ms. Rausing runs a very influential foundation in her name which bankrolls everything from Hope Not Hate in the UK (£915k to date) to an LGBTIQ rights organisation in Kyrgyzstan (£247.5k and counting).

Now, Sigrid Rausing doesn’t need to ‘buy off’ politicians for her own personal gain. What more can someone like her hope to materialistically achieve? I doubt she cares. Ms. Rausing funds what she does because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. And not only that, but also what she thinks doesn’t matter too much in the long-run. It will just get taken over by professional charity managers anyway.

This is why any attempt to integrate the activities of these foundations into some overarching theory of ‘neoliberal hegemonic capitalism’ is doomed to fail. None of this stuff really serves ‘capitalism’ as a system, or is in any way connected to making its founders richer. All of these foundations have a particular ideological bent. They are all left-wing, in some shape or form. Some are more extreme, some are less. But they all bend in that direction. Insofar as there is any explicit, conscious ‘neoliberal’ agenda, it is utterly dwarfed by the far-left charitable swamp.

Unless we collectively do something to stop them, these charitable foundations are set to go on indefinitely too. Assuming their investments are managed prudently (most hire professional investment managers), there is no reason for them not to continue splurging billions for years to come. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust was founded in 1904 by a Quaker pacifist. By the 1970s it was funding Communists in Mozambique. It’s now one of the biggest charitable foundations in the UK, funding racial demagogues and cybertron armies alike.

Same goes for the Ford Foundation, set up of course by Henry Ford, who at least judging by the international grants it made in 2021 ($656 million worth), has also gone Communist. When George Soros dies, do people really expect his influence to suddenly stop? It won’t. It will be continued by the same machine that is currently in place, and probably going even crazier and more unhinged once the old man kicks it.

While personalising attacks on oligarchs such as Soros can be useful, what we are dealing with here is a structural problem.

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If we want to have a shot at changing society, our goal must be to seize the state apparatus, and use it to destroy this third sector. The easiest way would be to ban every single charity in existence and then selectively allow for soup kitchens and the like to founded, which could all be shut immediately at the executive whim of the new regime. But the charities need to be shut down, and the foundations expropriated and banned.

This is necessary for any serious change to be possible. To do anything otherwise means to have a ready-made opposition primed to destroy us and reassert their fetid kingdom of lies. The regime insists on calling these charitable entities ‘civil society’. But all you have to do is read about ‘civil society’ in Belgrade or Bangkok, and you quickly realise it’s quite clearly the same class of professional activists running about, usually with the blessing of various foreign embassies of countries who are themselves more comprehensively captured by this same occupational class. It’s all nonsense.

People need to understand how this corrupt system works. We need to get to a point where when Normies see talking heads from charitable bodies, they roll their eyes, and sarcastically ask who is funding them. We need 1980s-in-the-Soviet-Union-tier cynicism. We need to make sure people start seeing these charities and the people who run them for what and who they are: sacks of money left at the random whim of decrepit billionaires and flung about by random activists.

Describing Dashiell Hammett’s noir detective character The Continental Op, literary critic Steven Marcus inadvertently captures the reactionary. Both detective and reactionary emerge from profoundly disordered societies. Their gut tells them something is amiss, that their circumstances are fundamentally unsatisfying. Each finds himself waking up to a world of falsehoods, where natural inclinations are everywhere subverted, where human flourishing is derailed or destroyed, and where truth is buried under mounds of error. With little to nothing left to ‘conserve’, the reactionary becomes a deconstructionist, a detective, stripping away contemporary liberalism’s false legitimations.

There are several branches of reactionary thought, but most if not all share at the core an antipathy for the money-power, a sacral understanding of culture, affinity for hierarchy, and some degree of hero-worship. These threads persist regardless of any particular riffs or permutations. The reactionary, through churchism, nationalism, vitalism, traditionalism, or some combination thereof, struggles against liberal nihilism, the deracination of romantic visions and immaterial goods. In short, reaction rejects the myth of Progress.

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Modern decadence rarely takes the form of lavish balls or orgiastic retreats. Instead, it is characterized by exhaustion, the desocialization of pleasure and thrill, anhedonia. Late cartographer of capitalism Mark Fisher describes the latter vividly as “the soft narcosis, the simstim eternity, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana.” All forms of fulfillment eternally forestalled by gluttony, onanism, and the general inability to disconnect from our ever-present digital dopamine drip. Contemporary reaction, then, often originates as a backlash against passivity, consumerism, sterility, physical weakness, and all the other rotten fruits of disenchantment.

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While it is no doubt true that many past eras surpassed our own in virtue, beauty, and spirituality, it is impossible to return to the same set of social, economic, and technological conditions that shaped the past. A Bushism summarizes the issue well: “I think we can agree, the past is over.” The challenge, then, is to fashion a society out of postmodern clay, in which natural virtues again flourish. The reactionary mind must attune itself to the particular ailments, conditions, and advantages of postmodernity. 

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Until very recently, this was an apt description of the Western world. But as liberalism works itself pure and intersectionality marches through the institutions, it also reintroduces the West to metanarrative. From the Enlightenment’s murder of myth, through to the Enlightenment’s death, we have arrived again at an era of myth. As the United States continues its transformation into an ideological state premised on gender gnosticism, anti-whiteness, and anti-nationalism, liberalism’s hyper-moralism becomes clearer.

Today, the West is returning to the political as such, to a state of polemos, the social warfare that punishes, purges, and partitions. Yet the regime’s tendency toward anarcho-tyranny, as well as postmodernity’s general liquidity and chaos, lends extra potency to reaction’s promises of order, beauty, and the sacrosanct. These developments are a great boon to reaction. Politicization is a preferable outcome for the reactionary, and one step closer to the outright conflict necessary to effect social rejuvenation.

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With normalcy demonized at every turn, the West finds itself in another Prohibition era. The person who honors his ancestors, obeys God, and admires traditional mores participates in “collaborative illegality.” Societies of illegality, where day-to-day life becomes a radical state of affairs, are fertile ground for reaction. Confrontation is everywhere preferable to obfuscation. If, as detectives, reactionaries are emergent byproducts of decline, then we should expect them to proliferate as decline accelerates and the spirit of polemos enlarges.

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The scuttled America First Caucus recently proclaimed America as “a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” and decried mass migrations disruption and disintegration. The media backlash to the term ‘Ango-Saxon’ was both predictable and educational. America, as it was perceived by the Founders and most subsequent generations, no longer exists.

The Confederates are clarifying here. If we considered the United States as an Anglo-Saxon civilization, which incorporated other ethnic groups into this civilizational fabric, the Civil War was a tragic conflict between kin. If being American means identifying with a vacuous, chimeric liberalism, then the Civil War was an existential battle between the supposedly chthonic horror of racism and the ever-perfected march of reason. This is exactly how the ruling elite perceives the United States: a polity on an ideological mission to liberate the world, whatever form that liberation may take in each succeeding generation. America’s refusal or inability to recover a moderate and reasonable ethnos is nothing less than suicidal. If immigration continues and there is no American identity aside from vapid cosmopolitanism, the money-power will continue its disintegration and rulership over the United States.

A bleak portrait, perhaps. But so is a crime only halfway solved. As a detective continues his investigation, to be called on amid a crumbling society of illegality, so does the reactionary continue forward. He is often the fortunate benefactor of Providence, that sublime knife which eternally slips loose Gordian knots. The Gracchi brothers’ assassinations by the optimates and their mob paved the way for Caesar; Jacobin excess unwittingly opened Fontainebleau’s doors to Napoleon, and Europe’s midcentury dirge kept Iberia under reactionary rule until the third Christian millennium. If Buchanan began transforming American conservatives into reactionaries, and Trump made reaction politically viable — if even for a moment — we can reasonably hope reaction will maintain its historical relationship with decline, and be nourished by decay.

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With that and all the above in mind, we may sketch a vision for an Occident shaped by reaction. As with reaction generally, it will be a romantic vision. After liberalism’s society of illegality inevitably buckles under its own weight, the regime’s simultaneous reaction emerges triumphant. The inevitable degeneration of republics into oligarchies reaches its climax: the ‘one and the many’, king and peasantry, president and people, triumph over ‘the few’, optimates, oligarchs, regime Brahmans, and the like. Porous borders are shut, capital is disciplined and reordered to serve national rather than global, financial interests. Liberalism’s atomization buffet is shut down for good, the policies and laws that annihilated the family are overturned, gender is reembodied, and voluntary infertility is a dwindling artifact, a bygone object of derision. The past, which Fisher calls “forever lost and forever insistent,” is insisted upon, and revitalized through new modes of government, old sacraments, and the erection of monuments that honor the past and promise the future.

If this sounds fanciful, it’s because it is. No clarion call to ‘build’ can make the path any straighter or the course any clearer. What reactionaries may take solace in, however, is the organic nature of human societies, the predictable decline and rejuvenation of civilization as superorganism, history’s countless overthrows and about-faces. When it happens, it will seem as if it couldn’t have happened any other way. Georges Sorel speaks to this through Vincent Garton’s translation, prophesying: “We would very much need a Mongol conquest to effect the rebirth of great art, today enslaved to the barbarian tastes of the plutocracy.” Accordingly, only terminal decline produces successful reaction.

No longer are digital public spaces sources of meaning-making, mutual belonging, free exploration of the total edges of human existence, and abstract machines of desire-creation. They are only suited for a particular type of regimented neoliberal subject, one that is sanitized of all dissident desires and thoughts, reinforced by various techniques of discipline from outright bans, surveillance, and ways of cutting off channels of information.

Of course, I won’t be making an equivalence between internet censorship and the real horrors of exception that create the Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben has pointed to over the years — such as the mountains of bodies in 20th century millenarian regimes, the war on terror, the poor, old and infirmed left to die in catastrophes such as hurricane Katrina. But there is no doubt that a micro thanato-necro politics is taking place, one that could potentially reach from the virtual world into the ‘IRL’ world, and given the new emergent form of digital subjectivity, it is not a stretch or hyperbole to claim that being blocked from engaging in that which is vital to flourishing in this age is to have a form of violence committed upon the self.

Of all the places I’ve traipsed through in either drunken stupor or adrenal ecstasy, Alaska reigns as the most enigmatic and beautiful. Half open-air insane asylum, half God’s country, the far-off territory reels in and keeps the country’s outliers. Its borders act as one great sieve, filtering through the phenomenally bizarre, the shockingly brave, and the aspirationally interesting. My first trip to Alaska took me north of the Arctic Circle. Flying in an eight-seater plane, twisting through storms over the Yukon River – this captured a hint of doing something novel. It was close to what I wanted. The summer was beautiful and largely monastic. But this pastoral isolation hadn’t scratched the itch. I was looking for something rough, something dangerous, something senseless. I wanted the kind of adventure you see in movies and read about in old books, replete with violence and sex. I wanted something heavy.  So, I went back. Unfortunately, the great splendor of journeying to the Last Frontier now mostly consists of being hassled by the airport DMV until you fall asleep with a crooked neck on your connecting flight. Instead of a romantic voyage, I ate mediocre sandwiches throughout my pilgrimage from JFK, to SEATAC, to Anchorage, to Seward.  We skittered into Seward on an old bus driven by an even older man. Resurrection Bay crept over the treeline, and as we finally skipped and rattled out of the thin pines, it exploded in panoramic glory. Black sands, ice-capped mountains, sunbathing sea lions, all of them accentuating the simple shimmer of the sun across the water. In the summer, the sun never goes down. Under that midnight sun, I’d meet many people. I’d encounter the sublime. There, I’d find that heavy ‘something’ I was looking for.

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